Thanks, Ken, I didn't grasp what Hrvoje was saying. Maybe still don't.

I agree with you that the person who studies at length the life, skills, development, and films of an author can get to know the mind of the author, at the time the movie was made, to a great extent. I wish that the same could apply to the hapless audience of the movie. I believe that much of what the audience interprets in a scene is what they project based on their own personality (psychological makeup, experience). However, I would stop well short of saying that the scene is divorced from the author's vision - creatives deal mostly in universal experiences and emotions, and build stories so that the character's motives are understood, so the scene must be largely relatable or it would miss the larger audience and we likely would not be hearing or talking about that movie.

Still not sure that I grasp what Hrvoje was saying, sorry if I'm a bit uninformed on this one. I don't believe that philosophy, at the time of Kant, had grasped the Postmodernist problems to any great extent. So, stumbling foolishly on, the blank screen referred to by Hrjove, can represent anything the audience wishes to project on it. What is going on is different for every individual. That fits well with Pomo. 

Modernism and modernist philosophy was mired in the belief that if it couldn't be sensed in a scientific way, then it (the noumenon) didn't exist. It hadn't dealt with the idea of a permanent position of skepticism and the idea of "constructionism," so that ideas beyond what were scientifically provable simply weren't real. I'm not speaking of construction in the sense of creating something new - inventing reality. I'm speaking in the sense of we experience and interpret the world differently according to our meaning paradigms, and our paradigms grow and change as we mature in our thought - we construct our reality based on new, confirming, and denying experiences and ideas that we create or hear from others (literature) that fit. The mother never interprets life in the way her child does. We interpret a story a little differently every time we see it. 

- Scott 

-----Original Message-----
From: Film-Philosophy [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ken Mogg
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2011 12:37 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [FILM-PHILOSOPHY] Crisis of representation ?

I think Henry is perfectly right to say that there was an earlier 'crisis of representation', or more than one (which may never go away), represented by Plato's allegory of the cave and by Kant's concept of the unknowable 'Ding-an-sich'.  Kant had grasped that the human brain is only one of a potentially limitless series.  Schopenhauer conflated Plato and Kant in his 'The World as Will and Representation' (and thought that he had found a way to come to terms with the Will - which he equated with the Ding-an-sich - in art, introspection, etc.).  So when Hrvoje characterises a postmodernist 'problem of understanding what the heck is going on ... where there is not any "scene" but a piece of canvas, or a part of the wall, or a stone-block', that particular problem seems to me but a small corollary of what Kant was describing.  I know that matters like 'the death of the author' enter in here, but I have yet to see them satisfactorily resolved in the case of, for example, Hitchcock.  Robin Wood said that 'Hitchcock was too sophisticated for the sophisticates' and the work of, say, Bill Krohn continues to show that Wood was right: that the authorial input, and conception, which can be traced, or at least intuited, from clues in the Hitchcock lore, and archives, are of far more richness and brilliance than the abstract significances (e.g., a gay reading of the films) that seek to go 'beyond' Hitchcock.  (Just at the moment, I can't think of any notable exceptions.)  Scott suggests that 'we can't get into the mind of the author', but, by golly, some of us feel that we're getting ever nearer as the years pass and we come to know the films, and the director, better and better.  (For what it's worth, Sidney Gottlieb is in the early stages of preparation of his third book of Hitchcock quotes and interviews.)  And the films themselves invariably leave open the possibility that there is a vast 'unknowable' beyond what we see on the screen while being clear that part of the problem is the human mind itself, just as Kant and Schopenhauer said.

I have for some time suggested that to appreciate Hitchcock in his fullness, you need to see him as simultaneously both pessimist (like the Symbolists, whom he admired) and anti-pessimist (like G.K. Chesterton, another of his favourites).  That's why Antonio Gramsci's advocacy of 'Pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will' struck me with particular force when I encountered it recently.  And now I see that Alan on this List (and this very thread) is saying that the film TAKE SHELTER 'is one of the finest examples of the opposite of Gramsci's' phrase.  It worries me a bit that a quotation is being contrasted with a film (is that valid?), but I'll look to see the film when it comes here.  I have already heard the film called 'Hitchcockian' (I hope that doesn't just mean 'in the style of M. Night Shyamalan'!), but wonder if it can possibly occupy a position not embraced by the fullness of Hitchcock's vision.  Alan may already have some thoughts on that, of course. 




    

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